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Louisville listing offers hint of divine — and onetime 'bachelor pad'

Church-turned-residence at 701 Grant Avenue is on market

By Charlie Brennan

Staff Writer

Posted:
01/30/2019 04:08:59 PM MST

Updated:
01/30/2019 04:10:53 PM MST

Now a private residence, this one-time church built in 1901 at 701 Grant Ave. in Louisville is for sale. Realtor Elizabeth Ryterski said "It really could be amazing, with the right architect and a lot of money." (Cliff Grassmick / Staff PhotographerA)

A historic photo of the church at 701 Grant Ave. (Louisville Historical Museum / Courtesy photo)

A century-sized helping of history is available in the heart of Louisville — perhaps carrying a lingering essence of the divine, for those who believe mere concrete and wood can harbor such intangibles.

The private home for sale at the northwest corner of Grant Avenue and Pine Street in Old Town Louisville, with a listed asking price of $649,000, looks very much like a church. That's because that's what it was for its first seven decades.

In recent days, in fact, it has gone under contract, although of course not every home that is under contract makes its way to closing.

And it was with that in mind that Re/Max of Boulder Realtor Elizabeth Ryterski, listing agent for the unusual offering, on Wednesday guided a visitor through the 6,524-square-foot property a very short walk from Louisville's Memory Square Park.

"It really could be amazing, with the right architect and a lot of money," she said cheerfully, as she picked her way carefully through the residence whose most recent owner attempted a remodel that was abandoned, leaving pretty much a chaotic chasm where an earlier owner had ambitiously installed an interior basement hot tub and koi pond.

"It was quite the bachelor pad — after it was a church," Ryterski noted. "I've heard there were a lot of good parties here."

A church for 70 years

Once, the house boasted three kitchens. Only one is still functional. The expansive basement includes one long room lined with racks for CDs — a previous occupant ran a music business from that space; there's another basement room where an ancient unmoored chandelier lies amid discarded televisions from both the Carol Burnett and Roseanne Barr eras.

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There's a small, dank and mysterious chamber to which Ryterski opened the door, shrugged and could muster only a "No idea."

In other words, it's a bit of a hot mess.

According to Bridget Bacon, coordinator at the Louisville Historical Museum, records show it was built in 1901, with an addition tacked on the back in 1946 to make room for Sunday school classes.

The view from the balcony of the church-turned-home at 701 Grant Ave. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

The earliest sale on record with the Boulder County Assessor's Office shows it traded hands in 1976 for $35,000. More recently, it sold in 2010 for a more hefty $485,000. It is billed now as offering two bedrooms and one bath in its 6,534 total square feet, packed into its 6,200-square-foot corner lot.

"The building served as the Baptist church building for Louisville until the dedication of a new Baptist church on South Boulder Road in about 1972, so, for about 70 years," Bacon stated in an email. It's at that point, she said, it was sold and rechristened as a private residence for the first time.

"Today, it and the Methodist church at 741 Jefferson are the only original church buildings in Louisville that date back to the early 1900s," she said.

Ryterski acknowledged the challenges the building holds for a new owner — there is a gaping hole, for example, in the ground floor of the rear annex — raising the possibility that someone could decide that a scraped lot on which the house now stands might, at this point, be a more attractive a proposition than what remains there now.

"I would be super-sad if they tore it down," she said. "It could be spectacular. But I love old houses, and I know that not everyone does."

The belltower stays

Caleb Dickinson does. A member of the Louisville Historical Commission, in 2010 he bought a property of historical significance that he is renovating a few doors down Grant Avenue from the former church. And, like Ryterski, he said there is no way, in the hypothetical event of a tear-down at 701 Grant, that Louisville would permit new construction there at anything approaching the square footage currently shoehorned into its existing footprint.

"It definitely breaks all current guidelines," Dickinson said.

The former church property is not historically landmarked, a process that in Louisville — unlike in other towns, including Boulder — is entirely voluntary. Should a new owner at 701 Grant seek and obtain landmark status for the residence, he or she would then be subject to limitations imposed by the Louisville Historical Commission on what could and could not be done in terms of alterations. For example, the distinctive belltower, and the 15-foot-tall windows that bathe the front living space (once the church sanctuary) in warming sunlight, most likely could not be substantively altered.

"The two-story large church in the front is more substantial than the single-story addition on the back, and an applicant would probably have more success to making alterations to the back than the front," Dickinson observed.

An upside to landmarking, he noted, is that a city sales tax provides between $600,000 and $800,000 a year toward a city historical preservation fund, to which owners of landmarked homes can apply for a grant of up to $21,900 in matching funds for approved renovation or preservation work.

Under extraordinary circumstances, grant amounts can go higher. Additionally, the commission is considering raising the base grant availability to the neighborhood of $40,000 to $50,000.

Whatever the fate of 701 Grant, the next owners will hold a link to the onetime mining town's past, times when one month's offerings at the church totaled a tidy $7.05 (1912), or when the Louisville High School football team snagged the Platte Valley championship (1944).

Ryterski doesn't mince words about the work in store for any new owner, even as she points out that the basement already boasts a large brick-framed woodburning fireplace, something new construction in Louisville is not going to have.

"And the furnace is only two years old, if you want a redeeming factor," she said.

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